The Turing codec is an open-source software codec compliant with the HEVC standard and specifically designed for speed, flexibility, parallelisation and high coding efficiency. The Turing codec was designed starting from a completely novel backbone to comply with the Main and Main10 profiles of HEVC, and has many desirable features for practical codecs such as very low memory consumption, advanced parallelisation schemes and fast encoding algorithms. This paper presents a technical description of the Turing codec as well as a comparison of its performance with other similar encoders. The codec is capable of cutting the encoding complexity by an average 87% with respect to the HEVC reference implementation for an average coding penalty of 11% higher rates in compression efficiency at the same peak-signal-noise-ratio level.